The Desert Mermaid

Venus and Jupiter are in line with the moon and lookin' mighty cool tonight. If the sun's just set wherever you are, look southwest. Won't be hard to spot 'em: I'm sure you know the moon, and Venus and Jupiter are the REALLY SHINY ones lined up in step. It's pretty neat!

Driving home from work the other night, I was fascinated to see a HUGE STAR in the east. “Good lord, but you’re shiny,” I thought. “And given the time and your location—my god! You can’t be Sirius!”

And no, I don’t keep up with daily astronomical happenings, but I have learned a few things about the sky—like how there’s no way in hell that was Venus, either.* By the time I got home, I had an educated guess. So as soon as I got home I was all, “Mom! Can I borrow your iPad?** I think I see Jupiter!”

Turns out I was right. Jupiter’s across from the sun for the next few weeks—it’ll be in opposition on October 28th. If you want to see an extremely shiny thing in the sky, look to the east at sunset, or the west at sunrise. That hydrogen is some reflective stuff.

I also got out my binoculars and may have seen one of the moons, but it’s hard to hold binoculars steady. Dang I need a telescope.


*Look, don’t laugh. I am not really good at translating my head’s excellent “zoom-out” model of the solar system into what I’m actually seeing. I’m working on it, though.

RANDOM FACT: I can never remember the mnemonics for naming the planets, but I know the planets themselves, so whenever someone has to remember the stupid “My Very Excellent Mother” whatever, I have to run through the planets in my head to fill in what the rest of the sentence is.

**The only thing on the iPad I’ve really liked is Mom’s astronomy app. You can hold it up to the sky and it’ll tell you what you’re looking at—constellations, planets, individual stars, celestial thingy-things like clusters and nebulae, etc..

Okay, no more silly posts, now that I can type on a real keyboard. I like my Nook, but I have a certain distaste for touch screens. I like to have a bit of resistance. I can see my oldness from here: in the future when we all have BrainPal implants, I’ll still get a keyboard instead of just typing WITH MY MIND like a normal person.

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Anyway. It’s also surprisingly nice not to wind up getting up-to-the-minute news. Hope all y’all East Coasters are picking up the pieces of your shattered lives, or at least the pencil cups that fell off your desks. Other than that, I hope I don’t need to catch up on anything. It’s nice not to have the weight of the world on my shoulders.

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Good grief, American Girl, who is picking your illustrators? Cécile and Marie-Grace are adorable and will definitely fill the fancy richness void left by Samantha, but what is with the illustrations that look like cut-and-paste? It’s not even like it’s the same illustrators who did the bad cutout drawings for Rebecca or Chrissa* either. Find someone who can do texture right, dangit.

On the other hand, those outfits just make me want to play Doll Dressup Time. Especially Cécile’s Meet Outfit. IT’S SHIIIINY.

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I managed to get away to Grand Teton National Park for a few days. I know it’s got a stupid name, but don’t knock a place that looks like this:



We go here a lot to get away, but this time it was a weird dynamic: me, Mom, Dad, and Dad’s younger sister and her husband. It was … weird. I’ve been coming here since I was three years old, and I’m pretty sure when I get into that context everyone assumes I’m three again. The good news is that, since I’m technically not three anymore, I could wander off if I started feeling that way. At night I could look at the stars, and in the day I could hike around and look around, see if I could spot wildlife.



And yes, I used an opera glass to observe stars and moose, because I am a classy motherfucker.

Oh, and there was a show about raptors on the deck one day. My favorite was a completely adorable great horned owl.



The owl’s handler was standing there to give the owl some shade. She’d try to move when someone wanted a picture, but every time she did the owl would get completely confounded and watch her wildly, like “WHERE YOU GOIN? WHAT HAPPEN?”, so the sunlight pictures are all of her blurry head.

I did pretty much nothing else while I was there. Wrote and read, in the view of some awesome majesty. Except for one day when I was all comfy in the cabin and reading, and I had the door open because it was a nice day, and a little marmoty thing** just strolled in and started inspecting my luggage. I tried to get a picture, but before I could he completed his inspection and strolled back out. Probably for the best, as otherwise I’d’ve had to punt him out the door, and I am pretty sure that is against park rules.

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Got back home and immediately got lost in the Tomato Jungle that is my garden. The pumpkins may be having issues, and somebody may have eaten my strawberries (I’m looking at you, birds), but WE WILL NOT LACK FOR TOMATOES.

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My sister started school this week. Ye gods, she’s a senior. No word on whether she has any excellent classes, but one can always hope.


*MOM: This one doesn't look so bad!
ME: Yes, it does.
MOM: Okay, yes, it does. I was just trying to put a positive spin on things.

**I am not sure what kind; the closest I could come was what the guidebook told me was a “Uinta ground ssquirrel,” but I have no idea if that is accurate. Also, I had no idea you spelled “ssquirrel” with two s’s.

Vega and Arcturus--I went out late tonight!

Got my mushroom log up and running! It is so far a bit of an ugly sight, sittin’ on my desk next to my Klein bottle and my jewelry pile.* I am led to understand that they will look quite lovely when they grow, but for now it looks like I have a very weird shrine to nougat sitting near my window. We shall see how that unfolds.

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Speaking of mushrooms, I’ve been learning “Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms” on the ocarina. Only trouble with video game songs is trying to end them. Perhaps this is why my cat has taken to punching me in the stomach when I play them. But it’s worth it—this song is ridiculously fun to play.

Anyway, while trying to find some sheet music for it I discovered that my weird love of Geno is shared by many other people who are probably equally weird. He is one of my favorite characters in the Mario franchise, despite Square’s refusal to let him come out and play anymore. (It’s okay! I made up for that prominently in my own extremely bad Super Mario stories, which I wrote obsessively in sixth grade before I even knew that anyone else in the entire world wrote fanfiction!) Good to know I'm not alone.

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I love the way people who make TV shows are completely clueless about video games. They don’t even try. They’ll have some scene where two people are furiously button-mashing, and saying scripted things like “Aha you got me that time!” or “Let me get the next powerup!”, except that any gamer could tell you that these idiots have got the game on single player mode, and furthermore it’s the middle of a cutscene. It has the great effect of making any character with a controller look like the little kids at the arcade who are furiously toggling the joystick and cheering while the screen still says INSERT TOKEN TO PLAY.**

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I have been craving pizza lately, but there is no good pizza place around here, frozen pizzas are nasty, and ready-made some-assembly-required pizza sauces and crusts all have about four cups of sugar dumped into them to appeal to the discerning consumer palate. But by god, it got bad, so I finally caved in and made my own damn pizza yesterday evening. IT TURNS OUT I SHOULD DO THAT MORE OFTEN.

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It’s a mite cloudy these last few nights, but I did manage to identify Betelgeuse as Betelgeuse and not just “one of the stars in Orion.”*** I’d never bothered to pay attention to star colors before, but it really is orange. I’ll be damned.

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Had to do this the night after a raccoon-and-skunk skirmish in the yard so’s I didn’t pass out from skunk fallout. That must have been some battle, because it involved a raccoon disguising itself as our cat, possibly replete with papers forged by Donald Pleasence. Mom opened the door and called for the cat, and lo a big furry thing with a stripey tail responded instantly by bounding toward her. No hesitation, no wild animal wariness, just “You’re inviting me in? THANK GOODNESS. THERE ARE SKUNKS OUT HERE!” We literally had to slam the door on it when we realized it was an imposter. And yes, we kept the real cat in for the rest of the evening.


*I try to keep my jewelry in boxes, but it always outgrows ’em. It’s like pasta from Strega Nona’s magical pot, only with more shiny bits.

**Or like your little sister back when she was really tiny and wanted to play video games so you gave her your other controller, which was not even hooked to the console, and told her she could “help” you, not that I ever did this.

***I know the four stars are supposed to frame his tunic, but frankly Orion always looks more like a guy doing a jumping jack to me. But at least it’s one of the few constellations I can recognize by gestalt!

You know, quite apart from any science, the idea of diamond seas on Neptune is just totally brilliant.

I’ve picked up a couple of books on stargazing. I’m terrific at armchair astronomy—I could tell you about binary star systems, how to get a supernova, the probable ages and classifications of various stars, and how black holes fuck up EVERYTHING.

But damned if I can find more than three constellations in the sky.* Hell, I only just recently realized just how the phase of the moon correlates to where it is in the sky at any given time. I couldn’t tell you Venus from an airplane.

And it occurred to me recently that, since I tend to stay awake all night anyway, astronomy’s a perfect hobby.

So I’m studying sky maps, waiting for the sky to clear up,** and looking up astronomical clubs or societies in Salt Lake. I’m also probably going to check out the Bad Astronomer’s guide to telescopes, see if I can’t find a good one.

It’s one way to get me out of the bat cave.


*Four, if you count the Southern Cross, but that hasn’t come up much since I got back from below the equator.

**At least it’s just cloud cover now. We had an inversion here for two weeks, and good god it was awful—I really hate looking down at a valley that’s invisible under a puddle of smog. And it was creepy at night, when you’d see this backlit cloud below you.

... Okay, one meteor sighting is cool, but two in as many weeks? Y'all, space is stalking me.

I would invest in a bunker, but my room is pretty much one already.

This one was definitely not a bolide, though. It was more sparkles and less flash, but by damn, it was still enough to get me to utter an impressed curse.

YOU GUYS.

I JUST SAW THE BIGGEST FUCKING METEOR I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE GODDAMN.

IT LIT UP THE SKY.

IT WAS A PERFECT VIEW FROM MY WINDOW AND IT WAS ALL BRIGHT ORANGE STREAKING STRAIGHT DOWN.

I MEAN HOLY SHIT THAT THING WAS BIG.

WOW!